My parents house sat empty almost two years after my mother died. My sister wanted to keep it. I wanted to sell it. We fought about it until neither of us could stand being in the same room. Eventually she moved away, I hired an agent, and the house went on the market. I thought getting rid of it would put that whole part of my life behind me.
It sold Monday to a couple from Toledo. I handed over the keys and went home feeling lighter than I had in years. At six seventeen Tuesday morning, my phone rang. The buyer said, you need to come back here. He would not explain, only that they had been pulling up the old flooring in the dining room when the contractor found something underneath.
I drove over annoyed, half expecting an argument about repairs. Instead the man met me at the door looking pale, and led me down to the basement, to a section of floor pulled apart. He pointed to a gap between two joists and asked if I knew what had been hidden there. I told him no. He reached down and pulled out something wrapped in plastic, and I recognized the handwriting on the outside immediately, because it belonged to my father.
Before I could touch it, a car screeched into the driveway. My sisters voice came from upstairs, yelling my name. The buyer looked at me, then at the bundle, and as the footsteps came down the stairs he pushed it into my hands and whispered that my sister already knew what was down there. And she did. Of course she did.
It was not anything terrible. It was the opposite. Wrapped in that plastic was a time capsule my father buried under the floor when my sister and I were children. Photographs of the two of us small and laughing, our old report cards, a cassette of us singing, a drawing each of us made. And a thick letter, addressed to both of us, to be opened together when we were grown.
My sister came down the stairs out of breath. She had helped Dad bury it, thirty-five years ago, sworn to secrecy, a little girl with a shovel. She had driven half the night when the buyer called her too, terrified I would open it alone, angry, without her, and ruin the one thing our father built to hold us together.
We sat on that torn-up basement floor, two middle-aged people who had not spoken kindly in two years, and we opened our fathers letter together.
If you are reading this apart, put the paper down and look at each other first. No house, no money, no old fight is worth what the two of you are to each other. I buried this deep so you would have to dig together to find it. Now dig.
We dug. We are still digging. The couple from Toledo got their kitchen renovated and gave two grown siblings their father back. I hugged my sister on that basement floor and did not let go for a long while.